WASHINGTON DC – Has Donald Trump lost the plot?
For a man whose very election to the US presidency was occasioned by his promise to be a safe hand at the tiller of the nation’s wealth, he suddenly appears to have forgotten that – in the 1992 words of President Bill Clinton’s adviser James Carville – it’s all about “the economy, stupid”.
As red ink has hemorrhaged from America’s major stock indices since last Thursday, traders have looked to Trump for a sign – any sign – that he can be trusted at the helm. But far from offering even the most basic, traditional bromides that might soothe the markets, Trump has seemed intent on pouring yet more petrol on an already blazing dumpster fire, risking his standing with the titans of commerce and everyday American voters alike.
In a weekend interview broadcast by the Fox Business channel, Trump appeared to have lost the backing and the patience of even one of his most prominent media supporters. Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo – dubbed “the money honey” during an earlier stage of her career when she served as a main presenter for business network CNBC – went out of her way to encourage Trump to calm nervous traders.
“CEOs want to see predictability”, she reminded the President as she groused about his on-again, off-again trade war with Mexico and Canada. “Can you give us a sense of whether or not we’re going to get clarity for the business community?” she implored.
TOPSHOT - A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) at the opening bell in New York City on March 10, 2025. (Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP) (Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images)
A trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on 10 March – the worst day of 2025 for the US stock market (Photo CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/Getty)
“Well, I think so”, Trump said, but then immediately indicated that tariffs “could go up as time goes by”. Bartiromo had heard enough. “So that’s not clarity”, she snapped at the president, a man she usually goes to the mat defending in her daily Fox broadcasts. Trump then indicated that he was tired of businesspeople demanding economic stability so they can make planned, strategic decisions. Clarity, he said, “sounds good to say, but for years the globalists, the big globalists have been ripping off the United States”.
Trump failed to identify the specific “globalists” that he holds responsible for the stock market rout. But after telling Bartiromo that he was unable to rule out the possibility that the US economy might go into a recession on his watch, the market sell-off continued apace.
After Monday’s disastrous drop, a White House official told reporters there is “a strong divergence between animal spirits of the stock market and what we’re actually seeing unfold from businesses and business leaders”.
The White House contends that 70 million Americans should not be fretting about the ongoing decline in the value of their 401(k) retirement funds, most of which are tied up in the stock market. Weaker than anticipated jobs numbers in February are also part of the “temporary blip” impacting an economy that is, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, simply “starting to roll a bit”.
Bessent told CNBC that the markets are going through a “detox” as traders react to the Trump administration’s cuts in public expenditure overseen by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (which is not, in fact, a real government department). He argues that forthcoming tax cuts will eventually provide the fillip that the economy needs to strengthen.
That message is the new orthodoxy at the White House, where spokesman Kush Desai assured Americans on Monday night that “President Trump delivered historic job, wage and investment growth in his first term, and is set to do so again”. The president’s “America First economic agenda of tariffs, deregulation and the unleashing of American energy with trillions in investment commitments…will create thousands of new jobs”, Desai insisted.
But like Trump’s proposed $4.2 trillion in tax cuts, all of that lies in the future. Congress has not yet even agreed to the president’s tax proposals.
The tariff war on Canada, Mexico and China is immediately resulting in the price rises that economists warned were inevitable (Ontario’s Prime Minister Doug Ford slapped a 25 per cent increase on electricity exports to the USA from his province on Monday).
The markets are spooked by Trump’s roller-coaster behavior on tariffs, and traders doubt that his much-touted announcements of fresh industrial investments in the United States will lead to actual manufacturing coming on-line anytime soon.
The losers are stacking up, like gamblers at the end of a long night in a casino.
The gains that Trump’s wealthiest backers (Messrs. Musk, Bezos, Zuckbererg and Altman) secured from his election have all been wiped out. Many American voters who bought Trump’s promise to lower prices and reverse what he called years of incompetence by President Joe Biden, now fear they were sold a pig in a poke.
Like King Canute, Trump appears to believe he can defy the forces of nature. But a president who cannot find the words to calm the markets and worried members of the public, nor even promise any kind of short-term stability despite the relative strength of the economy that he inherited, may be taking a shortcut to ruin.